Simon, I appreciate what you're writing, but I do feel it's idealistic and nostalgic. Art is whatever it is, has already had problematic relations to money, control, and the corporate. I'm old enough to remember the 'classic days' of Soho NY and it wasn't any different.
You get what you want from the artworld, from artists, from art discourse. (I just got trashed on nettime for art discourse, as far as I'm concerned, as opposed to the discourse of 'tactical media.' So it goes.) Most of the art I've ever seen has been mediocre, just like the most of anything. But for example the recent Matthew Barney show in Chelsea took my breath away - as did Nan Goldin's. I get tired of art trashing. In NY now there are more and more alternative spaces again and fantastic work done at some of them. The Gowanus Canal area is a case in point. There's a lot of cross-over work. There's a lot of arte povera as there always has been. People have been complaining about art's relation to money, about the good old days, about the corporate, about the corruption, about the gallery system (for what it's worth, Mary Boone was a student of mine and I've been on the boards of non-profits etc. for a long time, on and off), about the competition, about rapacious artists; back around 1972 or so, someone epoxied the doors of the Soho galleries shut as a protest against what you're talking about. I still learn from painters for that matter. I learn from everyone. And I feel that if someone doesn't like contemporary art, there's no reason really to look at it; talking about the good old days and the death of a certain kind of idealism seems a rewriting of history to me, at least as it's been in the US. The great thing about 'art' as far as I'm concerned is that it's always up for grabs - in the french expression, always already up for grabs. I'm sure there were arguments about who got what wall at Lascaux. You can even sense the competition there! We should celebrate art, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'm weak, but I do see wonder everywhere - your work, James's work, a LOT of the work on this list, on the Net. On Nettime I see puckered assholes, guarding a rhetorical territory that once had something to do with culture. Gone are the days of Cramer's (and my) 'Unstable Digest' which found all sorts of amazing things across the web - we had free license to put it up. If anything, issues of censorship, canon- and genre- defining are the real problems, but that will pass. We'll all pass and people will still be saying that art's not what it used to be! - Alan == eyebeam: http://eyebeam.org/blogs/alansondheim/ email archive http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ web http://www.alansondheim.org / cell 347-383-8552 music: http://www.espdisk.com/alansondheim/ current text http://www.alansondheim.org/rh.txt == _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
